2. Breathless
If Truffaut and The 400 Blows kicked off The French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard and Breathless culminated it with a never before seen mixture of energy, enthusiasm, innovation, and intelligence. Released a year after The 400 Blows, Breathless was actually a story written by Truffaut but directed by Godard, who put together most of the actual screenplay on set. In a sort of happy accident, the most innovative part of Breathless was originally not part of the plan. When the original cut of the film was too long, Godard decided that instead of cutting out whole scenes, he would cut out all the meaningless motion in the actual shots themselves, leading to the now common "jump cuts," where the camera seems to jump from one place to the next. Along with a host of other innovations, Breathless was a shot in the arm to the movie world and like The 400 Blows with Truffaut, it established Godard as one of the cinematic elite. Almost as important as its innovation was its attitude. Spontaneous, rough, and bold, Breathless changed the way movies were made probably more than any movie had since the release of the movie that beats it out for number one on this list.